Word: brian
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...Brian lards his critical comment with gossipy, digressive asides. Before this year's presidential election, he solemnly informed his readers that Lyndon Johnson was Jack O'Brian's man. When Lawyer Roy Cohn, a personal friend, put in a guest appearance on TV, O'Brian seized the opportunity to describe his buddy as "articulate, poised, informed, brilliant and even humble"-virtues rarely lumped together in a description of Senator Joe McCarthy's onetime sidekick...
...Brian's critics might forgive such departures from duty if he took a better view of them and their product. But the performers who bask in O'Brian's favor -Bert Lahr, Perry Como and Walter Cronkite, to name most of them-are vastly outnumbered by those who do not. O'Brian has excoriated Danny Kaye for 15 years on the grounds that Kaye's comic talent never escaped infancy. He is equally steadfast in his disapproval of Ed Sullivan ("Old Smiley"), David Susskind ("Little David"), CBS News Commentator Mike Wallace ("a vacuum") and scores...
...Standin. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., the son of a New York Central conductor, John Dennis Patrick O'Brian showed early signs of an incisive critical taste. Soon after he joined the Buffalo Courier-Express as a cub reporter, O'Brian was assigned to audit a performance of the local philharmonic orchestra. Offended by a guest appearance of some juvenile accordionists, O'Brian took the orchestra so severely to task that the incident became a civic cause celebre. When the orchestra changed hands shortly thereafter, O'Brian, with obvious satisfaction, claimed part of the credit...
Ambition brought him to New York, where the late George Jean Nathan, then theater critic for the Journal-American, helped him get a job on the paper in 1949. At the time, O'Brian had been the Associated Press's drama critic and sometime radio critic for six years. After a brief stint as a Journal-American rewrite man, O'Brian was assigned to do a radio-TV column. This was in the days when everybody who had a TV set was watching four to five hours a night and wanted to talk about it the next...
...Bridget, 7, and Kate, 6, are not allowed to watch "shoot 'em up" shows or waste a minute on Soupy Sales, a slap-sticking echo of vaudeville who appears on TV's children's hour. The first time that Ed Sullivan booked the Beatles, O'Brian praised the act. But after the air waves filled with Beatle imitators, he called a halt. "If this vast musical wasteland, this sump, continues," he wrote in his column, "it inevitably will encourage young people to forget neatness, ignore barbers, bypass cleanliness and turn into a nation of slobs...